It came up while I was posting a message. It showed in the address bar for maybe a second, then vanished. The site at the link does seem to be the Navy's Blue Angels, though Firefox says it's not using https.

???????????????????

_________________"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."--"Wag the Dog"

Chrome won't let me go there with or without https, it says it's not private and that hackers from there might be trying to steal my passwords and credit cards. They say they can't determine that the site really is blueangels.navy.mil.

I've never seen that warning before. The site, whatever it is, tried to load a cookie which I think tried to access the kernel and take control of my Chromebook's hardware. I know for sure it tried to turn on my microphone, but Chrome vigorously removed it before I could get a very good look at it.

I'm going to strongly recommenced that folks not go there and mess with that site without a computer that's wearing armor.

ZoWie if you actually got to that site and loaded their page I'm going to recommend that you flush your machines cookies and temporary files. At least look and delete any cookie from that address. Also look and see what your microphone and camera are doing. Run a scan if you have that kind of software.

It sure is interesting, l thought about firing up my Linux box with the armor and hacker tools, but it's not been updated since 2010 and I'm pretty rusty too. A few years ago curiosity would have dictated that I spend all night giving it a closer look.

I wouldn't have anything to lose Carmen, but I doubt that I would gain any information either.

ZoWie, can you remember what you were doing, and where you had been while writing the post you were writing at the time that odd link showed up?

I've thought about it and when a pop up tab does make it through my chrome browsers block and does pop up for a few moments before the browser closes it, it will not only open that tab it will shift it to being the active tab I am seeing, then when that tab is cleared away it shifts me back to the tab I was viewing before the popup appeared. That's usually at news site tab where there was an ad which if one hovered over it at all it clicks without me clicking it.

Suppose you were at a news site, inadvertently activated an ad, then switched your active tab to RFL, meanwhile your browser was gnawing at that odd link, (my machine would gnaw at it for about a minute before coming to a conclusion that it was bad), then upon getting to a point at which it had to, it switched you to that opening tab, then back to RFL when that tab was closed by the browser popup block. That would give the appearance of, and one the impression that the link had invaded RFL.

This is assuming that Firefox works somewhat like Chrome does and that you have popup's blocked.

I didn't go to the site. Firefox blocked it too, and that was that. The way things are these days, I can certainly believe that .mil domains could be compromised.

It was strange. It just showed up in the address bar for a second, the way a redirect would, but it didn't redirect. I think all I was doing was submitting a post.

The editor has gotten a bit strange lately. Sometimes I'll be going back to change something, and it'll stick a link to a post in the middle of the sentence. I don't know whether this is a "feature." It seems harmless enough.

It's a mystery. I tend to think that maybe the browser was indeed doing something else, but I can't replicate it.

_________________"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."--"Wag the Dog"

The one glitch I've seen occasionally on the board is I'll reply to somebody with the quote-reply button, and then both the URL and everything I'm quoting disappears ... all that's left is a blank quote bar.

BTW, I don't know why it would appear in your browser bar while browsing this site, but when I go to Blue Angels' website ... which is, according to Google, www.blueangels.navy.mil, I too get a warning in my browser about the inauthenticity of the site.

I'm not terribly interested in purchasing Blue Angels' shirts and other memorabilia which seems to be the point of the site ... but wow. Either somebody is impersonating the Blue Angels, or ... the Navy is doing something wrong.

_________________-- Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.Malaclypse the Younger

Well yah, anybody can just reload their machine if it gets hosed. Or simply never turn it on again and use something else.

But you're also a person who seems stuck in a kind of paranoid luddism regarding internet habits. It leaves you in a spot that lacks knowledge about current internet practices and standards.

"... paranoid luddism regarding internet habits."

I'm probably the only person here who doesn't bother using some kind of antivirus check software. I'm not concerned, I generally feel safe and sound in spite of the ongoing hysteria over fear of what might go wrong I see folks responding to all around me. I don't feel like I need for a big lock and key for my computers.

That doesn't mean I think there are no bad hackers out there, it doesn't mean I'm careless about where I go. I surf on one machine, do business on another, an older machine which if I wasn't using for that I would have quit using anyway. I only turn it on to do that business and then turn off. And I have that Linux machine and even older computer than my business machine, I don't keep it up any more.

What this saves me is time. I don't sit around waiting for processes to run, for pages to load while antivirus software does its thing. I know some of that software is free, and some of it is not. I have never paid a cent for that kind of software.

I have for one instance on my own machine, two instances on my daughters machine, one instance for my son, and one for my wife, have had to clean away a malware infection. In most of those cases I cleaned it out of the code, deleted the files and edited the registry. Not the kind of thing most people can do.

I am getting older and I'm no longer keeping current on the in's and out's of the latest code.

That website, which I won't go through because I get a browser warning, also, seems - based on what Google says - to basically tell people when upcoming shows are, and sells memorabilia relating to the team like shirts and hats.

_________________-- Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.Malaclypse the Younger

It's not a weird target for someone wanting to hack a site that attracts a lot of people. The better question is why both Firefox and Chrome block access to a US government funded site that should be as harmless as NORAD doing Santa Claus. Obviously, something isn't right.

_________________"Words are the new bullets, satellites the new artillery"--"Winning CNN Wars," Army War College

"One bomb was shown on TV, and the American people bought that war. War is show business."--"Wag the Dog"

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum